Waiting Room

Kassy’s eyes followed the outline of a stain on the waiting room carpet, as she kept her gaze firmly fixed on the floor, avoiding eye contact with anyone. Who knew what sort of crazies might be in a waiting room like this one? She certainly didn’t want any of them talking to her.

Kassy knew quite well that she didn’t belong in this sort of waiting room. She was far too normal for that. She was fifteen years old and blonde and quasi-pretty. She wasn’t a problem child. She didn’t do anything illegal and she’d never tried to kill herself. And she certainly wasn’t crazy.

Yet here she sat, in the waiting room at a shrink’s office, waiting to be analyzed and healed by the people inside who could supposedly read her soul and make it all better because they had spent four to eight years getting a degree in Freud’s sex-obsessed theories of analysis.

On the other side of the waiting room, she could hear a woman talking. She sounded as though she might cry, but was trying extremely hard to control herself Kassy willed her eyes to remain glued to the carpet, but as she listened to the woman talking, an insatiable curiosity overcame her. Glancing up in spite of herself she could see that the woman was talking to a small boy sitting next to her. His short legs swung freely from his chair, and his black hair was tousled. His face looked apprehensive, burdened with troubles that no face that young should have to bear.

“Now, Sweetie,” the woman was saying, “there’s nothing to be worried about. This woman is going to observe you and me and your mommy, and she’s going to decide who should take care of you. I don’t know what she’ll decide, but she’ll make the right decision, I know she will.”

As the woman spoke these last words, Kassy could hear a catch in her throat, and found herself interested, in spite of herself. The little boy was looking longingly at the woman sitting next to him, and she was looking at him with all the love of a mother. Surely this meant more than bloodlines or a shrink’s diagnosis. Kassy inwardly swelled with indignation, despite the fact that she didn’t even know these people. She didn’t even know what relation this woman had to the boy, although she guessed that she was probably a foster mother. All she needed to know was the painfully apparent look of love they shared. Love and fear. Fear that they would be pulled apart.

Kassy’s eyes filled with tears. Not over these strangers in the waiting room, but over the loving look they’d shared and how much it reminded her of her mother. Everything reminded her of her mother these days. Since the accident, Kassy couldn’t hear the wind in the trees without hearing her mother’s whisper in it. She couldn’t walk into the house without listening for the sounds of her mother moving about, or perhaps the smell of her cooking something. And her mother had loved her, just as this woman in the waiting room loved the small boy beside her.

Kassy hastily wiped the tears that were forming in her eyes, disgusted with how emotional she had become in recent months. Having already broken her resolve to look only at the floor, she forced her mother out of her mind as best she could and looked around the room for something to distract her thoughts. Her eyes came to rest on a couple, sitting with a chair between them, yet obviously a couple just the same. They were sitting as far away from each other as they could without having three chairs between them, and yet each one would continually steal glances at the other, looking just for a moment before quickly averting their eyes and looking the other way. The woman had a perpetual look of hurt in her eyes; the man, perpetual guilt. What was the story there? Kassy wondered. He cheated? They were trying to stay together and make it work? Perhaps they still loved each other after all…but then why would he cheat to begin with? All of this ran through Kassy’s mind, as she began to mentally weave an elaborate story for these people. The man was seduced by a young and voluptuous co-worker who promised him romance and intrigue and an exotic youth to live over again with her. He fell prey to the fantasies she wove for him, and before he knew it, he was involved in a passionate romance that was spinning out of control...

“Kassandra Carson, the doctor is running late, but will be with be with you in just a few minutes,” announced the receptionist behind the desk, crisply and without much ado. In an instinctual reaction, Kassy looked at the floor, shamefaced at having her name spoken allowed in this place. But as she looked determinedly at the floor, she came to the realization that the low buzz of conversation in the waiting room was going on just the same, and no one but she had paid this announcement any mind. And even if they had, she reasoned, how could they judge her? Everyone in this waiting room was here with a problem, so what did it matter if they knew her name?

Emboldened by this thought, Kassy allowed her eye to return to roving the room, this time alighting on a girl not much older than herself. The girl was sitting just a few feet away, and was staring hollowly at the wall. She was thin and gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and small, bony hands. Her skin was pale and sallow, and Kassy could see dark circles under the girl’s blue-grey eyes.

Just as Kassy was taking note of this fact, these very eyes flicked up quite suddenly, and stared straight into Kassy’s brown ones. “Hi,” said the girl sharply, with an edge to her voice. “Am I really that disgusting looking?”

Taken aback, Kassy had no idea how to respond to this. She just stared blankly at the girl for a moment before stammering out, “No…no, you’re not disgusting.”

The girl gave a short and malicious laugh that was more of a cough. “Thanks for your vote of confidence. It makes me feel all warm inside,” she said, in a voice thickly laced with sarcasm.

Kassy squirmed with discomfort. She wanted to just end the conversation there and go back to staring at the floor, but somehow she couldn’t. There was something about this girl that compelled Kassy to keep looking at her. Something about the way her eyes seemed deep and hollow, that made Kassy very curious as to what those eyes had witnessed to jade them so badly. She was fixated by the ghost-like figure, and couldn’t help but stare.

The girl, aware that Kassy was still watching her, turned to look at her again, this time with decided annoyance on her face. “Do you really have to stare?” she demanded.

“Sorry,” said Kassy, with as much self-assurance as she could muster. Then, for lack of a better idea, she put out her hand. “I’m Kassy,” she said uncertainly, having no idea how her gesture would be taken.

The girl looked at Kassy suspiciously for a few moments, eyeing Kassy’s hand as though it might reach up and slap her at any moment. Kassy was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and was about to retract her hand when the girl slowly extended her own, and placed it in Kassy’s. “I’m Kate,” she said shortly.

Uncertainly, the two shook hands, and then each quickly retracted her hand as though unsure whether to regret the gesture. There was about a minute of silence between the two, before Kate finally spoke. “So,” she said, cocking her head in Kassy’s direction, “What’s a wholesome-looking thing like you doing here?”

Kassy looked awkwardly at the ground. “Oh, it’s nothing really,” she replied.

Kate gave an incredulous kind of snort. “Generally speaking,” she said, “I‘ve found that most people don’t pay a shrink a-hundred-bucks-an-hour over ‘nothing.”

Now Kassy squirmed with discomfort. In a way, she didn’t want to talk about her mother with this girl, but in a way, she did. There seemed something almost comforting in the anonymity of talking to this person who knew nothing about her, here in this room where everyone had a story.

Kate did not push her further to tell her what was going on, and, after waiting a few moments, she sort of shrugged and went back to looking at the wall. Then Kassy, realizing that the opportunity to talk to this girl would be over as soon as the shrink called her in, took a deep breath, and spoke, very fast and all in a rush.

“My mom died in a car crash fairly recently and my dad is already talking about seeing new people and I’m absolutely furious at him and I hate him and he’s completely disrespecting my mom and I miss her so much it hurts.”

Kassy said all of this in one breath, wanting to get it out before she lost her nerve, and when she was done, Kate was looking over at her with a mix of pity and amusement in her eyes. “How recently?’ she inquired. Her voice still had an edge to it, but was somewhat softened from its previous tone.

“Six months,” Kassy replied.

There were a few moments of silence before Kate spoke again. “You know,” she said. “Six months isn’t all that recent. It’s good for the man to get out and move on.”

Kassy’s eyes flashed violently as she looked up at the ghostly form beside her, infuriated by this stranger’s casual treatment of her story. She clenched her fists and narrowed her eyes, her lips drawn into a tight line. “And what would you know about it?” she demanded.

Kate, seemingly unmoved by the fury she had evoked in her companion, gave a quiet and humorless laugh. “I know very much about it,” she said quietly, still staring at the wall. Then she turned to Kassy, leaning toward her and looking straight into her eyes. “Both of my parents died three years ago and I’ve been on my own ever since.”

Kassy had no idea how to respond to this. While this girl’s words didn’t make her own tragedy seem any less terrible, it was so awful in its own right that Kassy had no idea what to say.

And so there was another awkward silence, wherein Kate stared at the wall and Kassy stared at the floor and each contemplated her own story and her companion’s. Kassy, after she got over the initial shock of what Kate had said, found herself immensely curious as to how this girl had survived for the past three years. What had she done? Where had she gone, and how had she ended up here? Finally, her curiosity got the better of her, and looking back over at Kate, she asked timidly, “How have you gotten along?”

Kate looked back at her questioner, seeming somewhat surprised by her interest. Now it was her turn to seem reticent about revealing information. She didn’t drop her eyes, however, and after a few hesitant moments, she began to speak.

“I was thirteen,” she said slowly, “and my parents were out at a party.” She looked pained by her own words, but also hardened to them at the same time.

“My parents did some stupid stuff. They drank a lot and also did some stuff that wasn’t legal. We weren’t even legal residents of New Jersey, because they each had outstanding DUI violations in other states and had moved without transferring residence. We were essentially refugees, and on paper, we didn’t exist in very many places.” She said all of this very matter-of-factly, and Kassy was astonished by her words. This was the stuff of movies, not reality. She could scarcely believe that she was sitting next to a person with this sort of background.

Kate continued. “One night they were partying and they took a hit of acid from a bad batch. It really messed them up, and they died shortly afterward. I had no family, so I moved in with my boyfriend. No one cared. My parents weren’t exactly the sort of people that attracted much notice when they died.”

Kassy listened with increasing amazement, mixed with disbelief. She would have been inclined to think that this girl was lying, except for the fact that Kate was playing down the drama of her story. She was now looking down at the floor while she talked, and she didn’t seem to be going for shock value. She was just teffing it flatly and quietly.

“You. . .you moved in with a boyfriend when you were thirteen? And his parents didn’t care?” Kassy asked timidly. She didn’t want to interrupt Kate’s story, but she was really curious. At fifteen, she couldn’t imagine the idea.

Kate once again gave that sharp laugh that was more of a cough, and which seemed to imply that Kassy was naïve and stupid for asking her question. “He didn’t live with his parents,” said Kate simply. “He was eighteen.”

Kassy was further stunned. “You were twelve and your boyfriend was eighteen?” she exclaimed, louder than she intended. A few people sitting in the waiting room looked up for a moment, but then went back to their own conversations, thoughts, and problems. Everyone in that room had their own concerns.

At Kassy’s astonished exclamation, Kate’s mouth pinched itself into a tight-lipped smile. “Yes, I used to be a quite a catch when I was younger. Before I turned into this.” At this final word, Kate’s hand gestured up and down herself, over her frail form, gaunt face, and stringy hair. Kassy looked at her with a kind of wonderment, envisioning what Kate might once have looked like. She imagined her with a bit more flesh, filling out her form, which was presently skeletal in nature. She imagined her blue-grey and hollow-looking eyes with more life in them, her cheeks less sunken, and her skin more vibrant. This girl was probably a beautiful child, and this thought made Kassy sad.

Aware that she was staring at Kate once again, Kassy averted her eyes, and Kate laughed sharply at the gesture. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not looking,” she said. “I know I’m ugly now. But I didn’t used to be.”

“You’re.. .you’re not ugly,” Kassy said with uncertainty. She felt she had to say it, and in truth, Kate didn’t look ugly to her. She looked disturbingly thin and ghostly, and otherworldly, almost like a spectre, but that didn’t make her ugly.

Kate looked at Kassy incredulously, as though she wasn’t sure what to make of her. “You’re a nice sort of girl, you know that?” The way she said it, Kassy was not at all sure whether it was intended as a compliment or a dire insult. “I haven’t been around a nice sort of person in quite a while,” Kate went on to say in a quiet and thoughtful tone, as though musing over something far off in the distance.

She went quiet for a while, and Kassy wondered whether it would be appropriate to ask for the rest of Kate’s story. She was desperately curious to hear more about the eighteen-year-old boyfriend and everything that had ensued in the last four years. She was absolutely captivated by this girl, but also a little afraid of her, and she didn’t want to annoy her by pushing her for her story.

After a few minutes of mental debate, however, Kassy’s curiosity won over her fear, and she timidly asked, “So, what happened after you moved in with your boyfriend?”

Kate seemed to be snapped out of a reverie by the question, and looked at Kate with surprise, as though unsure where she was, and trying to get centered back in the moment. “Sorry,” she stammered, “I was just thinking...” Here she trailed off, and suddenly seemed to remember that she was sitting in a waiting room, talking to a complete stranger. In an instant, the sharp, sarcastic, and guarded persona that she’d had in the beginning of the conversation returned. Her eyes narrowed slightly, and she pinched her lips together. She looked at Kassy somewhat resentfully, as though annoyed that this girl had penetrated her shell, even for just a few moments.

“Right, so I moved in with my boyfriend. He lived in a run-down little place not far from us, so moving in was really no big deal. He worked at some fast food place, and I kept going to school for a while, since I was too young to find work. As soon as I turned fourteen though, he started to get on my case about ‘earning my keep’ and so I got a low-end job bussing tables at a little restaurant where they didn’t care that I was fourteen years old. By that time, I’d gotten pretty good at blending. At school, I could blend in and hang out with friends without drawing attention to my ‘unique living situation.’ Teachers sometimes got worried by how few clothes I had, but I was usually able to get them to leave me alone with a few reassurances. I was good at those. At the end of junior high, I just stopped going to school entirely. In the transition to high school, it was very easy for all of my paperwork to just sort of ‘go away,’ and everyone assumed my parents had just up and moved again or something. Between our combined tiny salaries, my boyfriend and I got by.” Kate paused here, taking a breath, and also allowing her eyes to rove the room, as though she was contemplating how to continue.

“So things were going good,” she said with some hesitation. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea of being a dropout, but you play the cards you’re dealt. We were getting by, and gradually, we’d have gotten ourselves higher paying jobs and maybe managed to get out of that neighborhood someday. You never know.” She paused and bit her lip. “And then I turned up pregnant.”

Kassy’s mouth fell open, completely against her will. Although she didn’t want to appear completely naïve and clueless, she found this last statement completely beyond belief. Kassy had grown up in a world completely sheltered from things like drug use and dropouts and teen pregnancy. They were the sorts of things that one read about as statistics in some newspaper article, shook one’s head over, and moved on. But Kassy had never met anyone who had actually encountered these things. And now this girl sitting next to her in the waiting room was telling her that she had “turned up pregnant.”

Kate could clearly see that all of this was running through Kassy’s mind; it was written all over her astonished face. “Yeah, I’m one of those,” she said, her sarcasm once again thick. “I was one of those pregnant teens. One of those degenerates who the general populace really really doesn’t want to breed.” She gave a tight-lipped smile before she continued.

“But I didn’t breed. I didn’t want to add more degenerates to society and perpetuate the cycle. This world has never given me anything, not even a chance. Why would I want to bring another person unwittingly into this world? So that they could get screwed over too? So that they could grow up without so much as a shard of hope to cling to, knowing that they’re going to be a slum kid forever and they’d better exercise their wrists for table-bussing and burger-flipping? There wasn’t even a question in my mind of whether to abort the kid. Believe me, if the kid had a choice and knew what sort of world was waiting for it, it would ask to be stabbed with a coat hanger.”

Kate paused again, aware that Kassy was once again staring at her with the astounded look of naïveté that’s being given a thorough shakedown. “Relax,” she said with some bitter amusement. “I didn’t actually do it myself with a coat hanger or anything, so don’t burst a blood vessel.” Then she cocked her head to one side, as though something had just occurred to her for the first time. “You’re not rabidly pro-life or anything, are you?” she asked. She looked as though part of her actually wished that she was, just so that she could provoke a good scene.

Up until this point, Kassy had considered herself to have leanings toward pro-life, although she was not “rabidly” either way. She had never really given it much thought, and was mainly pro-life because that was what all her parents and her parents’ friends were. She had never been exposed to any other ways of thinking, and so Kate’s philosophy was utterly foreign to her. The pro-life philosophy that had been engrained upon her since birth rebelled against the whole idea, and yet everything that Kate had just said, based on her story, made a lot of sense. She came from a world that Kassy didn’t understand, and could therefore make points that Kassy couldn’t argue.

Aware that Kate had asked her a question and she had been silent for a rather long moment, Kassy rushed to reply, “No…I’m not.”

Kate eyed her quizzically as though she wasn’t exactly sure that she believed her, but she let it pass. Now that she had spat this part out, she seemed to have no trouble continuing with her story. “Well, anyway, just to reassure you, I got it done at a clinic. Granted, it was the cheap clinic in my neighborhood, so it had its, well, ‘questionable qualities.’ For the most part though, it was on the up and up, and decently clean for my neighborhood. I bled a lot, but I’m still here and I didn’t breed, so that’s got to be a testament to something.”

She stopped, as though she might be through, but Kassy was looking at her with rapt attention. “What then?’ Kassy prodded with some timidity, spurred on by curiosity.

Kate gave the same short, humorless laugh that Kassy was becoming familiar with and said, “Well, that’s pretty much it. The interesting part anyway. The money for the abortion set us back a lot, and my boyfriend and I both upped our hours to try to get back on our feet. We were both so tired all the time that we pretty much stopped talking. Plus…l, I started being really careful about things, since I didn’t want to risk getting pregnant again…and he didn’t like that very much. Within a few months of the abortion, he had taken all our money and run off with it, leaving me sixteen years old, penniless, lacking any skill, and with no one in the world to care.” Kate was once again talking in her most matter-of-fact tone, listing off these atrocities as though they were a shopping list.

“Eventually, one of the girls I worked with who had sort of become my friend, I thought, over the course of my years at the restaurant, got worried by the fact that I had maximized my hours and still wore clothes that were all too short for me because they were old, and too loose because I’d gotten nastily thin from not eating enough. She was one of the few people who really guessed that I was younger than I said I was, and so she called Social Services and they came and got me at work one day and informed that I was ‘a ward of the state.’ Basically, that instead of supporting myself and minding my own business, I was about to become the state’s responsibility. Good deal for me, bad deal for them,” she said, smiling. “I haven’t eaten this well in my entire life, even though I’m stuck in a foster home where they tiptoe around my like I’m some kind of ticking time bomb about to explode and kill them all, or offer to sell them drugs, or impregnate the other girls in the house by my sheer presence and influence. And they’re bringing me here,” she said, nodding toward the shrink’s office, “because these people know how to make it all better.”

Her story having drawn to an end, Kate looked at Kassy to see how she was reacting. Kassy was looking at her thoughtfully, not sure exactly what to say, contemplating everything that this girl had just related to her. She felt as though she needed to say something, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. As she sat there trying to think of something that would be an appropriate response, the receptionist called into the waiting room, “Kassandra Carson, the doctor will see you now.”

Knowing that Kate would certainly be gone when she was through, and she would probably never see her again, Kassy turned quickly to her companion, and said the first thing that sprang to her mind. “Let them help you,” she said imploringly, “or at least let them try. I don’t know whether they can or not, and I don’t know where it all goes from here, but they’re trying to give you a chance…that shard of hope you were talking about that you never had.”

Kate looked up at Kassy with a sad sort of look in her eyes, like someone aged before her time, who’s convinced that it’s already too late for her. “You’re a nice sort of girl,” she said, looking at Kassy with a smile that was almost genuine, although it still had traces of bitterness.

Kassy could see that Kate was disregarding her plea as the naïve words of a sheltered little girl, and this upset her. Narrowing her eyes without meaning to, she said firmly and quietly, “You’ve been forced to deal with a lot that you didn’t ask for, but that doesn’t make you any less responsible for helping yourself now that you have the chance.”

Then, aware that the receptionist was watching her impatiently, she turned and followed the receptionist back toward the waiting office. She had no idea whether this person was going to be able to help her, or whether she would feel any better when this was all over. Kate’s story hadn’t made her own sorrow seem any less potent. Perspective hadn’t changed the horror of her own personal tragedy. What it had done, however, was made her recognize the value of having someone there willing to help her, and had at least made her want to try.

As she walked into the small and comfortable office, a young woman looked up from her desk and smiled as Kassy walked into the room. “Hello Kassandra,” she said kindly, “I’m Dr. Vessick, but you can call me Elizabeth, or Liz, or whatever you like.”

“Ok. . .call me Kassy.”